Lawmakers clash over nuclear-free act

By Lee I-chia / Staff reporter

Review of a draft act promoting a nuclear-free homeland (非核家園推動法) was idled again as legislators clashed over the deliberation procedure yesterday, with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers saying that they should wait for the Cabinet’s proposal bill and review them at the same time.

Just as the meeting began at the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee, KMT Legislator Chen Shu-hui (陳淑慧) took the podium and proposed canceling the meeting, triggering criticism from the committee meeting convener, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君).

Their exchange was followed by a heated quarrel between several legislators, while DPP legislators held up paper signs that read: “The KMT is blocking the draft act promoting a nuclear-free homeland,” and KMT legislators said that they were not obstructing the review.

“A nuclear-free homeland is a goal we all share, but the difference is that one side [the DPP] wants to achieve it immediately, and the other [the KMT] wants to achieve it gradually,” KMT caucus whip Ling Hung-chih (林鴻池) said, adding that the draft act proposed by the DPP was good, but his party wanted to wait for the Cabinet’s proposal for comparison and review them at the same time.

DPP Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) said the KMT was being deceptive by “pretending to be against nuclear power when it actually supports it” and “hampering the bill, but saying it wants to continue reviewing it.”

DPP caucus convener Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said that during the last session, the KMT promised to allow the bill to be reviewed in this session, but was now hampering the process, and that the Cabinet’s proposal on energy safety and promoting a nuclear-free homeland (能源安全及非核家園推動法草案) was actually about energy safety management, and should be proposed at the Economics Committee for separate review.

“Even if the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant goes into operation, it will provide only 6 percent of Taiwan’s total electricity supply, and I don’t believe that Taiwan has had no other way to solve this small problem for the past decades,” Ker said, adding that was unreasonable how the KMT defends nuclear power and has wasted so much social resources on the issue for all these years.

Ker suggested that KMT legislators persuade the government to give up the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.

The meeting ended with the separate views on the issue going into negotiations between the ruling and opposition parties.